Sunday, October 27, 2013

Thriller with a stutter

Saad Shafqat’s Breath of Death is quite the ‘thriller
from Pakistan’ it’s positioned as. It’s also a socio-political commentary on
Pakistan and an examination of the often fraught, rather complicated
relationship between Pakistan and the US.

And it is this
relationship between the US, Pakistan and the larger Islamic world that
provides the context for the book’s relatively straightforward plot. Dr Asad
Mirza, a talented, youngish neurologist and Nadia Khan, an eager medical
student, encounter a mysterious neurological illness in the wards of a Karachi
teaching hospital. While attempting to solve the puzzle of this strange
infection, the two walk right into the middle of a bio-terrorism plot against
the US.

Both Karachi and
the intricacies of the human brain are familiar territory to Shafqat, a
neurologist who lives in the city. And this knowledge shows. He writes with
authority and confidence about things that happen in the hospital and in the
city.

The writing,
though, is often jerky, with abrupt transitions. Yet, it’s also very
descriptive and evocative, painting portraits of people and places. Shafqat has
an eye for detail, and the images he builds are so powerful that I could almost
see, touch and smell them.

Characterisation
is one of Shafqat’s strengths and almost all the characters seem very real.
Even the ‘bad guys’ like Hamza Kadri, the scientist who designs the bio-weapon
and Malik Feysal, the zealous operative of the terrorist ‘Network’, are
portrayed as multi-layered beings. Sample this description of the fussy,
irascible, obsessive-compulsive Hamza Kadri: “Noticing a speck of grit on the
machine’s shiny Perkin Elmer monogram plate, he flicked it off with a finger.
Then he fidgeted with his trousers, adjusting them over his hips again. He stuffed
in his shirt. Then, noticing a fold that wasn’t quite right, he pulled it out
and stuffed it in again.”

Shafqat, also
deftly captures the love-hate relationship that many people in Pakistan — and
South Asia perhaps — seem to have with the US. An equation that’s equal parts
fascination and frustration. Even Asad Mirza, the book’s principal protagonist,
who’s studied and worked in the US, is not completely free of this sentiment.
As Shafqat writes early on in the book: “Deep down, all of them, even Asad,
felt aggrieved by America’s overreach around the world although not everyone
was willing to acknowledge it so openly.”

Yet, Asad’s
disquiet with certain aspects of US policy does not prevent him from doing the
right thing. Despite several challenges, he is able to alert the US authorities
about the bio-terror plot and all ends well.

My one big
grouse with Breath of Death is with
the plot’s pace. Like many of the soap operas on television, it chugs along
very sedately and then, before you know it, it’s all over. The ending is so
hurried that it seems shoehorned into the plot.

In fact, the
last few chapters of the book didn’t quite work for me; at least not in the way
the early chapters did. For one, I found the whole sub-plot built around
Nadia’s trip to the US to intern at a lab in Boston almost contrived. This
thread doesn’t quite add to the story, expect, perhaps, to bolster the thesis
about Pakistani disquiet with “America’s overreach around the world”.

Also puzzling is
a lack of attention to detail that creeps in towards the end of the book. A
telling example is how Nadia carries a biological sample in her backpack when
she travels to the US. She’s got no clearance from the US authorities to do
this and seems surprised when US customs confiscates the specimen. It is hard
to imagine how Asad and Nadia’s hosts in the US, both prominent medical
researchers, thought she could simply enter the country with a biological
specimen in a flask of formalin.

I also do wish
that Shafqat had given a bit more detail about how the virus designed by Kadri
worked. I know the plot hinges on deploying an aerosol-based delivery system.
But what is not clear is just how the virus was tested in Karachi. For
instance, how is it that the test subjects alone were infected by the virus,
while the people around them were untouched by the ‘breath of death’.

Despite these
bumps, I quite enjoyed Breath of Death.
It is an interesting and intriguing tale told rather well.